Port seeks payoff for BC councilor investment

The Caddo-Bossier Port Commission hopes to have pay off the over $600,000 it has shuttled over the years to Republican Bossier City Councilor David Montgomery as he literally carries water on a deal likely to be favorable for it but to turn sour on Bossier City residents.

This week, in its meeting the Council delayed a motion by Montgomery to begin approval of a cooperative endeavor agreement between the Port and city. Its complicated nature reflects the maze of interests involved.

The Port seeks to have an alternative source of water and its treatment to its present hookup with Shreveport. It pledges to issue $35 million in bonds to allow buildout of additional capacity for both. However, it wants Bossier City to run the facility and pay for its construction and maintenance in the city’s exchange for transmission and distribution of water and treatment of resulting wastewater to the Port and its users with those entities paying it for that service.

Political fashion leading to police tragedies

Almost three years of a collective insanity arose to make police departments woke, Shreveport appears to be paying the price in a manner that may cost lives.

Recently, a black fleeing suspect named Alonzo Bagley was shot fatally by white Shreveport police officer Alexander Tyler. This occurred not long after black Memphis police officers appeared to break every rule in the book in the apprehension, then death, of a black suspect Tyre Nichols.

The Memphis case has drawn far more attention and commentary echoing a worldview that began taking prominence in the late spring of 2020 with the death in Minneapolis of George Floyd, a black man who died in custody of non-black police officers. From that the widespread trope, up until then largely confined to certain academic quarters and political circles, developed that unarmed black suspects dying in arrest situations was a function of police brutality as a specific manifestation of systemic racism inculcated into American society and institutions.

Shooting handling to test no drama Arceneaux

Even though whatever Shreveport can do New Orleans can do better, Republican Shreveport Mayor Tom Arceneaux’s first stiff challenge is to ensure that stays true.

Last weekend, during the Krewe of Gemini parade shootings occurred at two different locations along the parade route. The one along Shreveport-Barksdale Highway resulted in a non-life-threatening injury, but the one on Clyde Fant Parkway – and in the designated “family zone” no less – left an out-of-town teenager dead.

Not to be outdone, a day later in New Orleans during the Krewe of Bacchus parade a shooting there just yards from the route took one life and injured five. Of course, this has become old hat in the Crescent City, where in the last decade shootings on or steps from parade routes have occurred in 2015, 2018, and 2022.

On cue, Edwards produces one last bad budget

A tax-and-spend liberal to the bitter end, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ last budget request reflects the irresponsibility emblematic of his fiscal policy-making that he hopes has staying power.

State governments have lived on a sugar high for two years with record-busting national deficit spending force-feeding money to them, creating false economies fattening state coffers besides allocating bonus bucks to spend. This all will dissipate starting this year. Further, Louisiana has scheduled sales tax relief commencing in a couple of years and faces escalating payments to move its pension funds towards solvency.

The responsible approach would make few if any new commitments and find ways to shrink government. Then there’s the every-man-a-king approach taken by Edwards which ignores this reality and treats the state’s finances as if throws from a carnival krewe.

Edwards legacy: more govt, worse-off citizenry

After seven years of mendacity and braggadocio, the Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards managed to top itself on those accounts when introducing Edwards’ last budget.

Last week, prior to getting into the nuts and bolts of the fiscal year 2023-24 request, Commissioner of Administration Jay Dardenne pelted the Joint Legislative Committee on the Budget with his version of the state’s financial health prior to and during Edwards’ terms. The presentation noted how through the eight years previous to Edwards each year at some point the Revenue Estimating Conference declared a budget deficit, how budgets routinely used funds sweeps or taking idle money out of accounts that had little or no possibility of being spent for their assigned purposes, and then since Edwards took office how those years had declared surpluses without any funds sweeps with a couple of more forecasted surpluses in the future.

Implied was the tax cuts previous to Edwards had a negative impact while the tax increases staged by Edwards and insufficiently resisted by a Republican-led Legislature had brought a bounty. A laundry list of items into which the state poured money in the period followed, and as a side note observed the state had the lowest unemployment rate ever.

Wilson entrance to freeze LA governor's race

A preemptive strike by Louisiana Democrat activists appears nigh in an attempt to freeze out intraparty gubernatorial competitors, leaving most declared Republicans in the race hoping that won’t succeed.

The seeming inevitable entrance of Democrat Shawn Wilson into the governor’s race, fueled by his notice he will resign from leading Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ Department of Transportation and Development in about two weeks, has as the only obvious reason behind that setting himself up to take one for the team. Any Democrat would run as a heavy underdog, but for party powerbrokers it’s as important that a quality candidate present himself than he wins.

To put it mildly, the party in Louisiana faces severe crisis. As its national level has careened without ceasing wildly leftward, it continues to pull the state level further away from the median Louisiana voters’ issue preferences. This causes it to win fewer elections then ever at the state and, to a lesser extent, local levels. The party’s rapid loss of white registrants – its 408,344 at present or 13.7 percent of the electorate and 35 percent of all Democrats is down nearly 100,000 and 3.2 percent of all having been 40 percent of Democrats four years earlier and eight years earlier is over 180,000 fewer or a total drop of 6.9 percent and from being 44.2 percent of Democrats – makes it increasingly noncompetitive except in areas with a near-majority or greater number of black registrants, who comprise only about a third of the statewide electorate.

Reasonable library bill helps parents, children

Woke politicians and journalists will expend a lot of energy this spring trying to construct a fable over proliferating bills addressing minors’ access to sexually explicit material in public libraries. Let’s dispel these myths right off the bat to understand the necessity of the bills.

So far, a pair attempts to restrict children from accessing age-inappropriate material. HB 25 by Republican state Rep. Paul Hollis doesn’t address the issue directly, but in its making explicit in state law that members of boards of library control serve at the pleasure of the governing authority it would allow such an authority to remove recalcitrant members that in its judgment failed to protect minors.

Directly addressing it is SB 7 by GOP state Sen. Heather Cloud. That would define objectionable sexual content in library materials for minors according to First Amendment jurisprudence, create a review process for patrons requesting that judgment of the board for disputed material, give parents the option of restricting that material to their children, and would penalize noncompliant boards by negating their ability to have capital outlay bonds approved.

Library takeover latest Bossier Jury lawlessness

It seems when it comes to dual officeholding, the Bossier Parish Police Jury just can’t find its way to following the law.

The Jury deliberately injected itself into controversy over dual officeholding law when it sanctioned the Cypress Black Bayou Recreation and Water Conservation District by reappointing to the governing board Robert Berry in 2018 after he became executive director of the agency in 2014, shortly after the Jury had named him to the board. That now has gone to litigation, with judges so far allowing this to go on (apparently confused in supposing that statute draws a distinction between ability to and acting on that ability to influence the board when it doesn’t) but a Supreme Court stop seemingly inevitable (although the Jury may try to moot this by not reappointing Berry when his term is up in the middle of the year).

Legal maneuvering in this case has gone on for over two-and-a-half years and made some headlines. But under the radar all this time and before there have been multiple jurors also in violation of the same law in regards to the parish’s Library Board of Control.

Tenure reform needed to aid LA universities

There’s no need to waste taxpayer dollars on initial skirmishes about the merit of tenure in Louisiana higher education. Skip the preliminaries and get on with the legislation.

Last year, Republican state Sen. Stewart Cathey authored a bill to convene study of altering, if not abolishing, the idea of tenure at state schools. It breezed through the Senate but, unusually for study bills, drew significant opposition in the House, mostly from Democrats.

A lot of these bills never produce the intended report, through a combination of institutional resistance and absent follow-through by those requesting the response, including from the author deciding to back off. Cathey chose the latter course but also has stated he intends to move forward with legislation congruent with the idea that the task force would have studied.

Hypocritical sportscaster discovers woke limits

Social justice warriors learn the hard way, as Shreveporter sportscaster Tim Brando found out last week.

Brando, a fixture around Shreveport Regional Airport for many years travelling to the various sports gigs he announces, occasionally ventures into social/political commentary when not behind the microphone. He found that voice again when complaining about a proposal by the Louisiana State University Board of Supervisors to name the basketball court at the Pete Maravich Assembly Center after both Dale Brown and Sue Gunter, past coaches of the men’s and women’s basketball teams, respectively.

Both were very successful, although by the numbers Gunter’s accomplishments were greater. However, Brown’s teams brought in far more dollars and much more publicity. His name currently graces the court, and in 2021 the supervisors rejected adding her name.